Dogs Have Their Day : Canines, Sleds Are a Potent Racing Combination, and All Drivers Can Do Is Hold On

A din of yelping and howling and barking and whining crackles on the sub-freezing air. The Truckee Lions Sierra Sweepstakes Sled Dog Races are about to start.

You wouldn’t hear this much canine cacophony if somebody turned an alley cat loose at a dog show.

Wouldn’t you protest being removed from a warm kennel and forced to drag a sled around in the snow?

“They do it because they want to,” insists one of the competitors, Jerry Jacobson, a breeder from Malad City, Ida.

Sure, they do.

“They love to do it more than I do,” Jacobson says.

Right, like a trip to the vet.

“When those dogs go to the line, it takes strong men to hold ‘em back,” Jacobson says.

Hmmm.

The dogs do seem genuinely excited. They strain at their harnesses. Several try to lunge forward, frustrated. A few leap in place, all four paws off the ground.

Force them to run? Just try to stop them.

Once the handlers start hitching them up, the dogs are in a fast-break mode. By the time they get near the starting line, they’re ready to explode like drag racers. When the handlers let go and the driver, or musher, releases the brake, snow flies, and they’re off at 15 to 20 m.p.h.

That’s why they call them sled dog races, not dogsled races. The dogs are doing the racing. The sleds just give the mushers--who ride with their feet on two thin runners extending out behind the sleds--something to hang on to.

The races are for 3-, 6- and 8-dog classes over courses measuring 3.4, 6 and 8.5 miles, respectively. As the teams leave the line at 1-minute intervals, announcer Don Casler follows their progress around the Truckee-Tahoe Airport course with radio reports from observers.

“There’s a team dragging its driver,” Casler reports.

Then: “Team No. 80 is running without a driver.”

It can happen even to experienced mushers.

Lin Neumann of La Pine, Ore., who won the 6-dog class, says: “If the dogs lose their footing and the sled stops, you can lose your balance and fall off.”

Or, a driver might go through what happened last weekend to Jean Russell of Fairfield, Calif., who has been racing sled dogs for 6 years.

“We were going really fast until the lead dogs hit some soft snow and stopped,” Russell said. “The wheel (rear) dogs piled up on top of the swing (middle) dogs. It was a terrible tangle. I set the snow hook and went out to start undoing the mess, and before I knew it, one of the dogs got loose and shot away out into the powdery snow.

“I’m calling, ‘Magic, come back here!’ She’s out there taking a little squat and looking at the team. Meanwhile, another team was going by me and I thought, ‘Oh, no, Magic is gonna follow that other team.’

“Fortunately, she had a little sense and came back. I hooked her up. Then I had to straighten out Scooter, and by that time, Rex and Ollie were still a mess. I lost about 10 minutes.”

Rick Meyer, a general contractor from Sebastopol, Calif., who won the 8-dog class, recalls a musher’s nightmare: when a team is so eager to run that it bolts and leaves him behind. What saved him that day was his lead dog, a Siberian husky named Saboka, which means dog in Russian.

“One of the last times he ever ran on my team, he was running lead with another dog when we got a tangle and stopped near a course checker,” Meyer says. “I asked her to hold the sled for me while I untangled the dog. When I got him untangled, the dogs knew they were ready to go and they bolted. She got scared and let go of the sled.

“They ran off down the trail without me. If there’s nobody on the sled, it’s easier for ‘em to run. They don’t care if you’re there or not. I chased ‘em as long as I could in deep snow with boots on, then walked for a long time after that. Then I looked up and Saboka had turned the team around and come back to me.

“I could tell from the marks on his neck from his collar that he’d been choking, he’d been pulling the team around so hard. They didn’t want to turn around. I wouldn’t have believed it.”

The Truckee Lions Club has been staging the races for charity since 1979, when it revived a tradition of the town’s 19th-Century mining days.

Jack London is said to have watched a race down the main street in 1915, and Clark Gable played a musher when London’s classic “The Call of the Wild” was filmed there in 1935.

Ed McMills, a retired San Francisco motorcycle patrolman, serves as publicist and alternate announcer. The Lions work hard on the event--McMills was just chosen Truckee’s citizen of the year--but some years their work has been wasted by poor snow conditions.

“We don’t call it annual anymore because we’ve had so many cancellations,” McMills said.

To make up for losses, a second ’89 event is scheduled at Truckee for Feb. 18-19 on President’s Day weekend. The Lions will settle for last weekend’s conditions, which were perfect: plenty of packed snow on the ground, no wind and cold temperatures--26 degrees Saturday, 10 degrees Sunday--to keep the course crisp.

When it runs, the event is part of the International Sled Dog Racing Assn.’s schedule of sanctioned events in Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Canada and Alaska.

It doesn’t pay much. Of the $5,000 total Truckee purse donated by local merchants, Meyer won $750, Neumann $475 and Kim Burrows, a veterinary technician from Lewiston, Ida., $150 for winning the 3-dog class. Gary Slattengren of Loyalton, Calif. won $300 in the 6-dog, 8.5-mile freight race for loaded sleds.

“This will probably pay for our gas,” Burrows said.

The 67 entries in 4 classes came from all over the West, including Alaska, and money doesn’t seem to be the primary motivator, least of all for the dogs.

McMills says over the public-address system: “I think you’ll feel the spirit of ‘The Call of the Wild’ here today.”

The dogs are certainly up for it.

Neumann says, “You can’t beat a dog to work. You can’t beat a dog to obedience. You can’t beat a dog to run. You can’t beat a dog to weight-pull. They have to want to do it.

“When we train, they run until we get the tongues hanging out, so they’re working hard, pushing themselves. But we also want to make sure that tail’s wagging.”

After a race, Neumann steps off the sled and goes down the line of dogs, petting and praising each one individually.

“See?” she says. “Look at their tails. They’re all wagging.”

Neumann tells how in 1987 she acquired her weight-pulling dog, a little black-and-white border collie, when it was brought into the clinic where she worked as a veterinary assistant.

“Her name was Trouble--literally,” Neumann says. “The owners couldn’t do anything with her and brought her in to be euthanized. That was the first time I’d taken a dog home to save her.”

Neumann renamed the delinquent dog Lucky Patty and trained her for weight-pulling competition.

“I’ve had her in 6 competitions. Her first competition, she placed second. The others she’s placed first, and at 32 pounds at Portland in November, she pulled 1,000 pounds on wheels, indoors on carpet.”

Today Lucky Patty is as sweet and well-behaved a dog as any family could want.

The trick?

“We gave her something to do,” Neumann said. “She needed direction. She needed to work.”

Weight-pulling consists of dragging a sled loaded with graduating weights. Even a trained dog will balk if the load seems too great--it will just sit down, as a couple did here, despite their handlers’ coaxing.

But Patty, lunging with all of her 32 1/2 pounds, moves 650 pounds the required 16 feet, and Neumann scoops her up in her arms.

“She wants to do well for me,” Neumann says. “She gives me everything she’s got. She’ll pull until it’s physically impossible for her to pull. She will not quit. They get the idea: If I pull this and come to the handler, I’ll get a treat, I’ll get praise. All dogs want praise.”

First-time spectators at the races generally are surprised on two counts: The dogs are smaller than expected and come in several breeds and cross-breeds.

The racers are lean, averaging about 50 pounds. There are some purebred Irish setters, even a few Dalmatians and perhaps a greyhound, but most common are the Alaskan huskies derived from those and other breeds, with Arctic breeds as a base.

“Alaskan huskies are kind of hard to define,” Meyer said. “They might have a little bit of greyhound or Irish setter in there to get the speed up. The toughness comes from the Alaskan dogs.”

Hardly anyone runs purebred Siberians, malamutes or Samoyeds--the traditional- looking sled dogs.

Many of the drivers are women, which is consistent with the results of the world’s most famous sled dog race, the 1,049-mile Iditarod from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, in March. Women have won the last 4--Libby Riddles in ’85 and Susan Butcher 3 in a row.

Neumann was asked how women can compete with men in sled dog racing, on equal footing and with equal success.

“Some people think this is sexist, but women are natural care givers,” Neumann said. “We have an eye to see when an animal or a child is not feeling well or needs something. A man can train himself to do that. I think a woman has it naturally.”

But Neumann has no ambition to try the Iditarod.

“I don’t have a natural sense of direction,” she said. “I’d be a fool to do it.”

Besides, she said: “We train our dogs to run wide-open, to sprint. Those dogs are trained to go 100 miles in a day. If Susan (Butcher) came down here and we ran our teams together, I could probably beat her in 10 miles, but then mine would (fade).”

But quit? No way.

Over the speaker, Casler announces, “From trailside, we have another runaway team.”